Launching the HighWLAN

After stopping for the night at a cabin in central Ohio, we were ready
for the final day of driving and a shot at wireless networking.
Schwern and dha drove Meng's Volkswagen Passat with Schwern's laptop
thrown in the back seat, running talkd. dha was the co-pilot for the
Passat and assumed all communication roles for their car. Meng rode
with me in my Hyundai Tiburon acting as communications officer and
uplink controller.

After quite a bit of man handling, we managed to get everyone on the
network. We had all sorts of odd, novice-like issues. First, we were
using a Netgear Access Point that Meng had in his car. This didn't
work out too well. Next, Schwern's laptop didn't have the proper
essid set and we managed to get that working at a gas stop. Once
those issues were resolved we had our laptops on the network and all
was good. pings were returning and ssh connections were
succeeding. Meng and dha connected using talk on Schwern's laptop and
we spent a good 100 miles just finding things to talk about. That's
what happens when you work hard to build something that's minimally
useful.

In order for this rig to be truly functional, we had to have communication with the outside world. This was achieved by accessing the Internet through my patched-in cell phone.

After rambling on about movies, making fun of each other's driving and
deciding where to stop for dinner we decided to connect our network to
the Internet. After all, we needed to send out proof that this was
working. Once my cell phone reached a state of moderately reliable
service, Meng brought up the link. We logged on to IRC and bragged
about our connectivity. We sent email stating our coordinates. We
acted like little children on sugar highs.

Just then Meng got an
emergency call from work and his services were needed online. Our
network was needed, what a wonderful feeling. We were online for a
solid hour, surely being passed from cell tower to cell tower. The
link stayed up just fine. Of course, we eventually drove out of cell
range all together and lost that link. The network continued to be
useful, we used it to communicate needed stops for gas or bathroom
breaks. It's a good thing too, what with Schwern's "expressive" driving.

Testing the Network

After hours of driving, we decided it was a good idea to see what
conditions caused the network to fail. It had been working like a
charm for most of the trip and as any tester will tell you, it's more
important to know when it breaks, not when it succeeds. We decided to
try a distance test first. Using the 200 foot markers on the side of
the highway we gave ourselves an estimated 500 feet of distance and the
connection was just as strong as ever. Then we slowly added distance
and at an estimated 800 feet the connection broke down. We were very
happy with that number, especially because it didn't represent Line Of
Sight (LOS). The testing laptop had to acquire a signal through
several cars in traffic.

Still later in the day we decided to stream MP3's from one car to
another. I had an adapter that converted the tape deck to an audio-in
jack that was connected to my laptop. Schwern's laptop was in the
Passat and was capable of streaming mp3's using
Apache::MP3. The
streaming worked but the playback didn't because my XMMS was throwing
a temper tantrum. All was not lost, however, we resorted to remotely
controlling Schwern's laptop to play random songs in the Passat and
there was nothing they could do about it.

There was one major problem that destroyed our network. If a large
truck drove directly between us is creates the same effect as a
careless backhoe discovering your fiber network. Those of you
familiar with most of I-70 know that the geographical layout is just
flat. Sure, there are a few hills but mostly it's just flat and bare.
Because of this, when large, dense metal objects decided to drive
between us there was nothing for our antenna's signal to bounce off of
to reach the other car. Again, all was not lost. Thanks to the
wonders of the TCP/IP protocol our connections were not harmed in any
way, just lagged a little.

What Good Is It?

There are several answers to this question. The simplest answer is
that it's just another incarnation of two way radios, cell phones, or
GPS systems. Like two way radios the local network is free. That
makes all the difference in the world. Like cell phones and GPS
systems, it can be connected to other useful networks and resources.

When I explained this project to
Adam Turoff he made a bold
prediction. He believes we'll see the US military using wireless
networks in the same manner. I giggle at the thought of secure
transmission happening over ssh to a server in an unmanned plane but
it could happen. I just want to be the first to know if they use IRC
or talkd for their communication.

I'd like to see a few companies begin offering wireless kits for
cars. With knowledge in the right areas, it would not be difficult to
create a hands-free client with voice recognition and even cell phone
hook-ups. I could do the software now with great Open Source speech
programs such as Sphinx II for voice recognition and
Festival for text to
speech output. Tie them together with POE and
my favorite programming language, Perl, and you there you go.

Last, I can't stress enough the importance of free, (mostly)
unobstructed communication. The cell phone costs would have been very
high. More troublesome than that is the service area on the open
road. Our network was up 99%, the cell phone companies didn't do that
well. As for the getting online with the cell phone, I'm just glad I
had a credit built up because that was expensive.

Conclusions

I managed to create a lot of hype around this project. Some called me
lame, some called me cool, but they all called me geek. All I know is
that my friends and I made the most out of an otherwise boring all-day
drive. Wireless networking has thousands of undiscovered applications
with no end in sight. Do your part to uncover the useful bits.